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The Journey to Big Bend

In December of 2015 I decided to plan a trip west between the holidays. The year before, in December 2014, I had done a winter trip to the Guadalupe Mountains and arrived in the park in a blizzard. It was a spectacular trip where I got to photograph snow as well as the Milky Way over the winter peaks.My hope was to do something similar in 2015 and I made plans to go again. As I watched the weather another blizzard was making its way across west Texas and it looked like I would have similar conditions. With the way the weather looked, Big Bend seemed to be the better option as it would get snow but be more on the edge of the storm.

Snowy Roads in Texas

On the morning I left the blizzard was stretched out across west Texas. I started west from Fort Worth on I-20 but could see on the weather and Google Maps that west of Abilene the roads were at a crawl, so I decided to to to go south and stay east of the snow line. I turned south at Cisco, then followed US 377 southwest to I-10 at Junction. I started west again, but soon found myself in the snow and worsening roads. I exited 10 in Sonora and headed south to US 90. I still passed through snow but now on empty roads and I was able to make progress. I drove past the Devil's River with trees in fall color and eventually got to 90. Then I turned west into a 50mph wind and made my way to Marathon.

Devil's River

The snow was blowing there and I turned south on US385 to the park. I made the park entrance at sunset. From there it was still almost a 2 hour drive to Cottonwood campground which I found almost empty and I set up my tent in the snow.What was normally a 10 hour drive had become an almost 14 hour day of zig-zagging to avoid the snow but I had made it. The drive was interesting and seeing the fall color on the Devil's River was a big surprise that I was glad to be able to photograph. Now, here I was in a national park that I had almost all to myself and there was snow on the ground in Texas! Talk about a great way to start a trip!!